


Lines Crossed

by wishwellingtons



Category: Endeavour (TV), Inspector Morse & Related Fandoms
Genre: 1960s, Blow Jobs, First Time, London, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Undercover As Gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 15:18:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8922157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: Morse and Thursday are off hooks when extra DCs are needed in London. The case goes badly wrong.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [obstinatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/obstinatrix/gifts).



Fred Thursday has been such a long observer of the delinquencies and low-living of human crime that sometimes the only thing to shock him is himself.

 

He knows what’s right, of course. Keeping present and past separate, domesticity and crime. Leaving work on the step and mending the garden fence both have nothing to do with those bodies like squashed flies against the window of that Italian farmhouse. A new pullover and a cracker hat at Christmas must be kept separate from the feel of your hand on the trigger. Your new constable, that long thin slip of a clever bugger (with big blue eyes that miss nothing except the advantages of a pint) must be sent for pipe tobacco while you smash your fist into a man who photographs children on their bellies. Morse is in a category not to be sullied, like the kids and like Win; he’s to be pushed, but never bullied. And ever since his arrival Fred has marked him as a line not worth crossing.

 

And then Morse, with his high-handed cleverness and his propensity to faint like a girl into Fred’s all-bearing arms, got himself sorted onto _a certain kind of case_. Fred was having none of it, but they’d not been eye to eye and unlike the loquacious, awkward sod himself, Fred didn’t have the vocabulary to explain that of all the whippersnapper constables being packed like tinned fish onto the 8.05 to Paddington, only one was half-daft in pursuit of glory. Only one was totally unsuitable as bait in Fred’s old stomping-ground, and unfortunately that one lad was the only one clever enough to solve the case.

 

Fred knew the type, of course. He couldn't do much more than _know_ it; the whole bloody mess was predicated on him and any other recognisable copper not being around to sort it, so all he’d done is look through the notes. He remembered his first year as a copper had seen a lot of it, on nights. Along with doing something for a kiddie nobody’d bothered to feed for a week, picking champagne charlies out of the gutter, dealing with superstitious old grandmothers terrified by Teds and the new blocks of flats (who frequently gave him lucky heather before he left), and peeling apart ageing queens who’d wanted to kill each other in Notting Hill cellars, there’d been a spate of boys too scared to ring for a doctor, never mind the police. One had only been found because six bedsits all shared a bathroom.

 

And now it was the same thing all over again, but traced to three clubs (not worthy of the word) in a square mile around Whitechapel. Three blue-eyed, brown-haired lads all found dead within a month. The last the son of a QC. The plan was: a decoy. And for that, they wanted Morse.

 

Fred had lasted two weeks.

 

It was a disgrace: not just that Morse walked into the murderer on his third night out of HQ (you couldn’t call that city incompetence; Fred had noticed that the lad was a magnet for psychopaths of all kinds), but that they’d let him go so _unsupported_. Fred assumed they'd been either so dazzled by his intellect or contemptuous of his theory - that the killer had done everything he wanted to in Whitechapel and would next emerge at Vauxhall - that Morse’d been dragged half-dead out of a milk van only because some costermongers had heard moaning while they set up their stalls. The killer had got away, but now Morse knew his face. When he could talk (shortly before Fred started raising Cain in Oxford) he named Victoria Dock as the next venue (some bloody anagram, Fred had listened down the phone, hearing nothing but _he touched you_ ) and clamoured, insisted, on taking his alter ego, Fred Carter, out for one more Saturday night.

 

Fred reminded him that DI Courtenay of City was his governor now, hung up, and started to pack.

 

He arrived for what he initially thought was the showdown, having had time all the way from Oxford to regret the matching pig-headed obstinacies that had sent him and Endeavour off hooks. Something and nothing from an old case, and the old unsolvable conundrum of Morse disapproving of (despising, Fred feared) his governor’s resort to violence while Fred deeply disapproved of Morse’s policy of infuriating his superiors and haring off into the eye of whatever storms were going. Now, he felt as if he’d smacked his own Sam round the face, not just dressed-down a junior officer who’d presented him with rashly-gained spoils. Morse had been right in principle but gone about it all the wrong way. Now he was playing silly buggers in Fred’s old manor and - look yourself in the rear-view mirror and face it! - he had Fred’s heart in his jacket pocket, to boot. Heart was a nicer word than it deserved.

 

Sometimes he’d worried about the posh set Morse liked to run with; not that he wasn’t fit for it, but it would have suited Fred more to see him out dancing with a typing pool girl, or, better yet, master of his own hearth. He’d hoped for it with Joanie (they’d have given them their wedding china & eighty bob towards a deposit; between him, Sam, and Endeavour, there was no love nest they couldn’t spruce up) but had lost the hope along with that suit size (and the last cherished illusion about himself). What the lad needed was a normal time, a family. Not squalid flats with beer and dead vegetables in the cold store, and not suicide missions tarted up as a portmanteau of Fred’s own name and Fred’s own dead bagman, in a rookery of common crooks. Give him the uncommon criminals everyday. Give them to Morse. Keep him from harm.

 

Then he got into the investigating room just as a petrol-coloured sunset had turned into a filthy wet night. Not ten minutes into the greetings and commiserations of the weekend team, who knew that Fred carried police history in his footsteps, and that he was responsible for the bruised firebrand trying to do the same in Victoria Docks - not ten minutes into that fetching of notes and exchanging of rueful admiration - there was word sent of an officer down. But in Wapping, not Victoria Dock. Morse had realised too late, sped west past Limehouse in an unmarked car, and found the body of Detective Constable Billy Gordon, three months married and a native of Limehouse, folded double in an alleyway behind a cabbie’s rest. Blood all around. He’d stayed until help arrived, been violently sick, and disappeared.

 

Fred headed east.

 

*

 

The Waterman’s Arms wasn’t worthy of the name; though only just out of sight of the docks, it was impossible to imagine water. Barely possible to imagine air as you descended the stairs into what had obviously once been a scullery, in a house trapped between two bomb sites. 

There were planks across the upper windows, smog stains as high as your head. Black and green moss growing on the stairs, and the only sliver of sky full of rain. The sign, which was faded and askew on its bracket, swing like something from a horror flick. Fred had peeled or turfed out gay bars from Dean Street to Earl’s Court, but never anything as joyless or grim as this.

 

Inside, he was glad he’d foregone his hat and overcoat, too much the copper. The booths round the bar had lost their studs; the posters were coming away from the walls, and the floor was thick with sawdust and cigarette ash. There was a jukebox which sounded like it had a throat infection, with two boys each half the size and about the age of his Sam locked together against it, while a knot of blokes at the bar - all of them Fred’s age - watched them, brooding.

 

The dancing was near the jukebox, the other side of an ancient and foul-smelling pool table whose odour reminded Fred of wet wool and dead cats. The floor was the size of a postage stamp, and playing what Fred thought of instinctively as black music - the soul and motown his Joanie liked. Scanning the bar, Fred saw that the two boys serving were also young - too young. On another night he’d have given them their marching orders. Collar and ties on both. Undernourished faces and clever eyes; one, taller by a head, had the eyes of a girl, ringed in kohl and with painted lids. They drew eyes. As did the lad at the end of the bar, with yellow cheeks and a purple eye, lip cut to bright blood and the knuckles visible on his glass grazed and bloody. He was half the size of every man within eight feet of him, hunched in the shoulders, and he belonged to Fred. He was talking to two fascinated brutes who were becoming steadily angrier with each other and with him, and from the insolent but deadened look in Morse’s blue eyes, he didn’t mind which way the punch flew first. Silently, Fred cursed. The silly sod was leaning back against the bar with his hips canted and an arrogant angle to everything about him - no doubt enticing if you were a psychopath for whom the mud on Morse’s best suit and the bruises and blood on him just gave a hint of what he might be up for. His hands were shaking every time he lifted his glass; he was tapping his foot to precisely the kind of music he hated, and he was talking quicker - jibing, Fred could tell it - and as he gave the older of the two men a long, appraising look, Fred found that the sight was making him angry.

 

*

He got across the room in three sides. His bagman was just a lad lost in the monstrosity and no pretending otherwise. A soldier left out in the desert too long. Carrying out orders even when the mangled corpse of Billy Gordon meant they made no sense.

 

Morse looked up at Fred as if he were a cheap tart daring a wary punter, and Fred stuck out his arm as if to part the fray.

 

“He offered me a quid for a fuck before he hit me,” Morse told him, blue eyes cool and focused nowhere, and Fred was relieved that the two sods hanging over him found something horrible - either in Morse’s words, or Fred’s murderous face. They began to recoil. “Am I not what you were looking for?” Morse called, seeking and missing the bar with his elbow. “Was it not you who took Gordon up the - let me go - “

 

*

 

He’ll be sick in a minute, Fred thought. He’ll be sick, then he’ll cry, and when I’ve promised to forget that, we can forget all this.

 

One Christmas he’d bought Sam a dog on springs. Not quite a Woodentop, but something like, except the thing’s legs were all springs. His little lad had blooming loved it, funny little kiddie in his Christmas vest. Well, Morse was reeling like that dog, all springs and jelly as Fred marshalled him back across the sticky floor, and up the diabolical staircase.

 

The rain had stopped, stilling the square, except for the muffled motown from the club. Evidently the sudden transition to night air didn’t agree with Morse, who was heaving, and shivering, and stumbling towards the wall. Now he had the guilt and the horrors about poor little Billy Gordon, all because he hadn’t been lucky enough to stop a killer, even when he’d been smarter about it than half of London. Fred started to say as much, but Morse was dry-heaving. Well, at least he’d stopped looking at Fred with that look that needed to be slapped off his face.

 

Or not, Fred thought, as Morse turned away from the wall.

 

He lurched. Fred got his arm in the same iron grip, and something angry and reckless met the insolence in Morse’s face. Morse was drunk, but not enough to explain all this: grief, smoke, liquid guilt. Fred searched his face for any explanation adequate for all those ugly words back there. For anything to explain Morse running himself into enough danger to demean himself. Enough danger for Fred to forget himself (or near enough). Morse tried to yank away his arm. It occurred to Fred that he was trembling.

 

“Hey - “ began Fred, and Morse clamped his own hand over Fred’s wrist, and dragged him, more by luck than judgment, up against the alley wall.

 

They were five foot inside the alley. Less, between them and the Waterman's yard. Morse was unaccountably his full height again, pipecleaner with a bloody lip, looking at Thursday as if to memorise him.

 

At least there were no more of those filthy words. Fred tried a word of his own, with about as much success as last time, because he was already rock hard inside his trousers and when he’d managed even one syllable of tender, kind endearment, Morse half-sobbed, then collapsed to his knees.

 

It wouldn’t help; it wasn’t what the lad needed. It was incontrovertibly bad and the only possible line they could have crossed to compound the horrors of the night. Bagman blows senior copper in Victoria Dock queers’ bar. Outside queers’ bar. With said senior copper’s head thrown back against the wall, panting like a schoolboy, trying to remember how they’d come to this. It wasn’t what the lad needed; it was, however, what Fred wanted, senselessly possessive, ever since he’d known Morse could look like that at other men.

 

No - he’d wanted Morse before that, ever since - but he’d wanted him differently to this, and wanted things for him, other than these, other than Morse kneeling in the mud in his best suit, arching his neck and slitting his eyes shut to give Fred simultaneously the worst and best attempt at a -

 

Clumsy in this as in nothing else, Morse pushed at Fred’s cock with his mouth and hands, the pain from his cuts blooming but quickly overlooked. Thursday’s hand was in his hair, caressing, approving - warm. Not like the cold fingers he’d touched in Wapping, not like the hot hand around his throat when -

 

This wasn’t a nice, normal time. This was groaning like a Dean Street cottage because your lad was dazed and desperate and on his knees for you. Morse wasn’t sober enough to balance; the bobbing of his own head sent his hand splaying towards Fred’s knee, for purchase. Fred’s hand stayed heavy in Morse’s hair, cradling the back of Morse’s skull. He was steady even though his back and knees were beginning to hurt and his overcoat suffering from the smog and moss along the wall. Fred shut his eyes to visions of Morse; Morse folded in half the same way he’d once had an Italian lad, clothes stripped off. Morse learning never to let anyone else touch him again. No -

 

“Morse,” Fred begged, even there. “Don’t - “

 

“I want this,” Morse mumbled, and his slick voice carried a heaviness Fred couldn't ignore. “I do. You.” His eyes - Fred had never been able to last, against those eyes.

 

“You,” he agreed, like an echo, and couldn’t know that when Morse closed his eyes, he did so against the compassion in Thursday’s gaze. “My lad,” he added, quiet, and Morse shivered and worked harder.

 

Thursday heard the methodical, increasingly rhythmic slap of his own cock inside Morse’s lips; felt the cold seeping through the wool at his back. Desire was chased by all the panic and excitement of doing something so stupid, right here. He heard his own groans magnified and then, with total horror, repeated. They weren’t alone! There were footsteps further down the alley, a rasp of clothes, and they weren’t alone. He heard a zip, and made out - through dazzled eyes - an unmistakeable outline at the corner of the wall. Another pair. He felt Morse freeze, deductive powers apparently barely dulled.

 

There was a soft laugh, but not meant for them. Morse lent a little against his legs, breathing hard. His hair brushed the hanging buckle of Thursday’s belt. Thursday found himself biting his lip.

 

Slowly, involuntarily, he moved his hand in Morse’s hair. Morse shuddered and returned to the task. His head bobbed.

 

Raggedly, Thursday thrust his hips. To the sound of another man coming off, he shut his eyes and moved in and out of Morse’s mouth. This had probably ripped up both their careers, and lives, for good. Just before he came, when everything was Morse’s mouth and the crescendo of need (fuck him, _fill_ him), he managed to see the revellers in the courtyard part, the doing-up of flies and the spit into the drain. No, he thought, not like them, and croaked, inanely, _you’re beautiful, so good, well done_ , and Morse whimpered, and that noise made him come at once.

 

His knees kept him from dropping down the wall. When he reached for Morse, the lad was shivering. He lent against Thursday and the wall as if Thursday had dragged him, lifeless, from drowning. He was painfully hard, on a hair-trigger. Reeling. But they were still in the shadow of the pub.

 

Looking at Morse’s raw lips and the operatic line of his bare throat, Fred suddenly thought what a crying shame it would be if Morse had to be kept as quiet as he’d been. He grazed the ridge of his constable’s prick with his knuckles, and the whimper made him smile. He kissed the head that butted, abject, against his shoulder, and whispered, _easy, old son_ , in a way that made Morse whimper again.

 

Not that many hotels would be keen to have them, with Morse in that state and at that time of night. But Thursday smiled. There were other places, somewhere along the line.

 

This was his old manor, after all.


End file.
